Tag Archives: history

Victoria 3: I hope you like GDPmaxxing

You may have thought this blog was abandoned.  Nope, I’m just lazy.  So I didn’t want to write about Factorio (which I have a lot of thoughts about), instead I asked my friend from the Victoria post if he’d talk to me about Victoria and I could type it and clean it up to use as a blog post.  As this was from a conversation, it’s very much in stream of consciousness.  But then isn’t that what this is all about?

I asked him to describe what drew him to playing Victoria 3, and he answered:

The Victoria series is a peculiar one.  A mix of economics, politics, and war that this time is much heavier on the economics than anything else.  The real strategy of Victoria is Soviet Planning meets Laisse-Faire capitalism: the state invests heavily into construction and heavy industry, while letting the capitalists build the consumer goods factories for the masses.

I start every game, no matter the country, by building a bunch of construction sectors. Then I build lumbar yards for wood and iron mines for iron.  Construction sectors are what actually build things, they’re kind of like building companies, and the capitalists can contract them out the same as you.  You get a couple to start but you want a lot more to get off the ground quickly.  Wood and iron are the base construction materials at the start of the game.  If you’re an industrialized nation, you can also add tool factories into the mix, as you’ll be building with tools too.  

I want as much wood, iron, tools, as possible, because the larger surplus you have the cheaper it is to construct things.  Building a port costs the same amount of materials no matter what, but if I can buy those for 30,000 dollars instead of 100,000, that’s a better deal.  Oh yeah Victoria has a sort of supply and demand to model prices, if there’s more of a good available than what is being used, it’s price is cheaper.  So when you have a surplus it’s cheap, when you have a shortage it’s expensive.  A surplus of construction materials makes construction cheap.

I also want a lot of construction sectors so building goes faster.  Construction can only happen at a certain rate, so even if I have infinite money and materials, I’d be waiting for years to build all the factories I wanted if I don’t have enough construction sectors.  

So while I’m building out the construction economy, I’m hoping the capitalists and aristocrats of my country privatize the mines and lumbar yards I’m building.  When they privatize, they give me cash and get themselves an asset in return.  That asset will make money (since I’m building so much stuff), and they can reinvest that money into building more buildings later.  Remember that.

But I’m spending money like water trying to build out my construction economy.  I can jack up taxes but that hurts government legitimacy and makes everyone rebellious (insert American Revolution joke).  And even with sky high taxes, I’ll still run a deficit while building up.  So eventually my national debt will become a problem and I have to stop building before I go bankrupt.  This is when I hope the rich people of my country are ready to reinvest, and give back for the good of the nation.

When rich people in Victoria own a farm or factory, they get dividends based on how profitable it is.  They then use those profits to reinvest back into the economy by building more farms and more factories.  Once I’ve built out the construction industry, it should be very cheap for them to start building things themselves, things like wheat farms and clothing factories.  These soft goods are what my people actually want, you can’t eat iron or wear wood.  So if the peasants actually want to their lives to improve, more wheat farms and clothing factories need to be built by the capitalists, which creates a food and clothing surplus letting the peasants buy things cheaper, meaning the peasants can afford to buy *more things* as well.  

This is industrialization in action.  The rich people who built the factories and farms reinvest their profits into building more things, like wine farms and furniture factories and eventually telephone lines. This makes all those things cheaper and now everyone can afford to live much more comfortably than when we were all living as dirt farmers.  Also the rich Job Creators™ will gracious pay a wage to the factory workers and farmhands, and this wage pays better than what you can get as a subsistence farmer.  So this puts extra money in my peoples’ pockets and is another way that their standard of living can increase.  And since people have more money, they can demand even more stuff, which is why my capitalists have to always be building.  No one is ever satisfied, we always want more, so we need to make more factories to make more goods to bring prices down, hire more people into higher and higher paying jobs so they can buy things, and reinvest all that profit we make so we can keep the cycle going.  Forever.

This is economics, and it’s why I like Victoria.  It takes a real stab at simulating an economy.  And like a real economy, industrializing creates a virtuous cycle that spurs on more industrialization and economic expansion.

EDITOR’S NOTE: this is also why I, the editor not the talker, enjoyed Victoria 2.  Vicky 2 and Vicky 3 both have their strengths, *severe* drawbacks, and plenty of edge-cases where things go crazy.  But they both try in earnest to develop a real, working economics simulator that models both why industrialization was so beneficial, and why it was so hard.

Anyway, as the economy expands, it is hopefully my capitalists doing most of the building, spending their hard-earned dividends on new clothing factories and lowering the price of clothes for my people.  Because as my people can afford more stuff, their Standard of Living (SOL) increases.  The Vicky 3 typeface infuriatingly makes SOL look like SOI, but forget that.  When the people’s SOL increases, they become more loyal to my magnanimous government that made it all happen.  Should their SOL decrease, they become more rebellious (imagine that!).

So we want capitalists to build more factories so people can afford more goods so their SOL increases so my regime becomes stronger and more resilient to all the violent revolutionaries/liberals who would overthrow my absolute monarchy.

See Chapel Comics to understand the joke about liberals https://www.chapelcomic.com/64/

Now I made it sound complicated-yet-manageable up there, but trust me like any good economic simulation there are a ton of moving parts.  In addition to micromanaging what your country builds, you can micromanage its trade, setting up each and every trade route with foreign nations.  It’s *kind* of OK.  Trade routes cost convoys (which you build at ports) and bureaucracy (which you build at government institutions).  So there is still the Victoria 2 problem of there being no travel cost for goods, (a sheaf of wheat costs the same whether you bought it from the next town over or from China).  But by having trade require limited resources the player is at least fenced as to how much trade they can easily do.

And while the game does sort of try to model different economic systems, you’re still playing God even in the Laisse-Faire capitalistic system, you’re still an all-knowing god building the construction sectors and various heavy industry.  

So that’s the stuff I like about Victoria 3, so why couldn’t I convince my friend to play it?

EDITOR’S NOTE: really I didn’t want to buy another paradox game and sign up to a lifetime of DLC

Well I love Victoria 3 as an industrialization simulator, but it doesn’t do much besides that.  

So let’s say you’ve built all the heavy industry and now construction is cheap in your country.  Let’s say you keep on top of things as your economy grows, expanding the construction sector to meet new demands, upgrading your factories with newer technology, and so on.  What else can you do once you have a strong, powerful empire?

Not much really.

In fact, upgrading your factories is sort of a frustrating minigame in and of itself.  In older games, researching a new technology would just apply a flat boost to all your factories that used it, researching a better plow made your farms better.  Now however, you have to actually tell all your farms to use that newer and better tech, and that tech will have some cost (of iron, or tools say) that your farms will have to pay in order to use it.  If you upgrade your farms without having enough iron or tools for them to use, you can actually cause them to lose money as the grain they sell doesn’t cover the cost of the tools they use.

But why am I an omniscient god telling everyone how to run their farms?  Who cares.

OK not sidetracked now: what can you do besides economy?

Well war sucks, so don’t do that.  I mean in the game by the way, it is never fun in real life but games should be fun and in this game war isn’t.  They decided moving every individual army was boring an unrealistic, so instead you vaguely tell all your units to go fight along a “front” and they’re supposed to do all the action for you.  A few problems with this:

First, a “front,” is very very vague and yet each army can only and exactly cover one front.  The whole border between Russia and China could be a front.  Or two neighboring towns in Germany could be two different fronts.  It all depends on how the AI decides to split up the map and sometimes it chooses poorly.  But regardless of how the fronts are split up, a single 60 division army can cover exactly one front, and it will always be able to reach every battle along a ridiculously long front, but will never be able to fight a battle happening on a different front even if it’s within spitting distance.

But then, how exactly do the armies even fight on these fronts?  It’s pure diceroll and I don’t know if any skill is involved.  I click to tell my armies to go to a frontline and fight the enemy, then war vaguely happens offscreen, and I can neither influence it nor does it influence me.

See, wars in Vicky 3 are strangely bloodless affairs.  Soldiers are supposedly dying, territory is blasted with artillery, but it doesn’t seem to affect anything besides a vague “war weariness” number that ticks up until you’re forced to surrender or you win.  If your territory is conquered, you still get all the money from it, your people are still working their jobs, and all the factories are still sending ammo and artillery to your frontline (even though the factories themselves are behind enemy lines).  If your army is annihilated, they flee back to your territory to rest and recuperate, but you never see units wiped out that you have to replace, or see the effects of all the dead soldiers on your populace.  It’s weird, bloodless is the only way I can really describe it.  It’s like they *had* to have wars, because you can’t simulate the 19th century without them, but they didn’t want war to interrupt the economics lesson so they just put it to the side.

EDITOR’S note (long one this time): This is a complete change to how war was in Victoria 2.  Not only on a higher level, in that Vicky2 let you move around every individual division, but on a lower level in how war effected the rest of the game.

Occupied provinces in Vicky2 didn’t send you taxes or resources.  Their factories were blasted to rubble, their farms were torn to pieces.  The people living there would slowly run out of supplies, which not only lowered their life expectancy but made them militant and angry, angry enough to start a revolution.  More than once I would be fighting a war only to see enemy rebels pop up in the lands I had occupied, the occupied people deciding now was the time for a revolution to overthrow both invaders and oppressors.  Wars could turn into an interesting 3-way dance in this way, or even a 4-way dance if multiple different groups rebelled simultaneously.  

And beyond the front lines, the soldier pops themselves were important.  Soldiers staffed their regiments, and as they died in battle new soldiers needed to replace them.  That meant that during war you’d have to use your national focus points to encourage other people to become soldiers and fill the ranks, essentially you put on a huge recruiting drive, and that took away from your abilities to raise literacy or factory output or anything else.  The soldiers themselves all had an identity too, and a home they were from.  

There might be a regiment of say Hungarian soldiers in Vienna.  They might have come from Hungarian people migrating to the Big City for work, and then being encouraged to become soldiers and join the army by your recruitment drive.  You can form them into a division, and as they take loses those Hungarian soldiers in Vienna will shrink more and more and more.  Eventually their division will take so many loses that it will completely disappear, along with the soldiers it was connected to.  

There may be other Hungarians, other Viennese divisions, but the *Hungarian Soldiers From Vienna* could come to an end, all because of a single bloody war where their division took the brunt of the fighting.

You could see these effects happening in real time.  If you recruited soldiers mostly from your nations ethnic minorities, then they’d be the ones to take most of the loses in your wars.  And if your nation discriminated against ethnic minorities, you could find that your own soldiers would rise up and join the rebels when the time came.

None of this seems to happen in Victoria 3 wars.  Farms, factories, and soldiers aren’t all that troubled by the killing, dying, and destruction.  It’s one of the biggest misses in a game full of misses, war doesn’t seem like war.

But unfortunately war is the major way you can interact with an affect the game world.  The AI knows it too, and can be a lot more trigger happy in this game than previous one.  Victoria 2 had a habit of AIs being fairly passive unless you screwed with them.  The “crisis” system was supposed to satisfy a player’s warlust by forcing all the great powers to have a showdown every decade or so, but if you weren’t in Europe you could ignore the crises and everyone else would ignore you (mostly).

Now though a strong AI is happy to march their army to war anywhere, anytime, for any reason.  Russia will send everything it has to Spain in order to support the independence of the Phillipines.  Britain will march on America because they want to change the rulership of Liberia (America’s protectorate).  Italy will send everything it has to Guatemala just because they didn’t want to join Italy’s alliance.  These are all wars that are possible, but somewhat fantastical because in the real world nations didn’t send large armies halfway across the world just for kicks.  Wars happen either with large armies close to home or with very small armies very far away, you don’t send out everything you have because what if your neighbors want to try something while your whole army is away?  You could be conquered in a day by someone far smaller than you.

EDITOR’S NOTE: fun fact, this was kind of the case in WW1.  I was watching a show that pointed out that Germany delayed the implementation of unrestricted warfare submarine warfare until it could bring units back from the Eastern front to station on the border with Denmark.  Submarine warfare didn’t just piss off the Americans and bring them into the war, it pissed off all Germany’s neighbors and could have brought any one of them into war.  There was a real fear that with literally the entire army in France and Russia, a nation as small as Denmark could pull a surprise invasion and be in Berlin before anyone could react, and they would definitely have a reason to if German subs started sinking a lot of Danish ships

So war feels very very gamey, AIs are way too willing to throw down for the slightest cause, but then again war is so painless that they might as well do so yeah?

On and politics?  It’s ok I guess.  Very confusing, very deep, very much something that you dream about and think “oh I wonder what cool things I can do!”  Then you actually play the politics and it’s not much.  

It’s not the worst when it interacts with economics I’ll say that much.  See the powerful people in your country are split up into interest groups (IGs) that have their own ideals and their own desires.  And in a non-industrialized nation, most of the power is held by the large landowning families.  And surprise surprise they don’t like changing the laws in any way that would negatively affect them.  So maybe you want to rationalize the economy to allow for private investment, open up trade to allow for importing of valuable goods, or ending serfdom to allow peasants to take factory jobs.  Any one of those is a threat to their power, so the landowners will forbid it.  And if you try to force the issue, they’ll rise in rebellion and overthrow you, reverting all your hard-fought laws to back to how they were before your reforms.

Reforming an economy in the politic sense is thus an uneasy balance of placating the powerful landowners, undermining their influence where possible, and desperately trying to enact laws before they can rise up against you.

But once you’re past that, the politics is just timers and dicerolls.  There really isn’t much you can do to direct the fate or your nation.  You can sometimes invite foreign agitators to try to start a movement for some cause or another.  You can suppress or support some interest groups to get them to be powerful enough to pass laws.  But it is really all down to chance and factors outside your control.  And there isn’t any real novelty to the politics either, there is pretty much always a “best” law that you want to be aiming for at any one time.  So no matter your nation no matter your starting position, you’ll be trying to pass the same laws the same way everywhere using the same dicerolls and timers.

Not exactly fun.

I’ll end on a final note about Power Blocs, or rather what they should be called which is the EU-lite.  Power Blocs aren’t what they seemed to be named after, where multiple countries join together for a common cause.  Instead they’re modelled almost exclusively after the British and Russian empires, where one nation (Britain, Russia) is *really* in charge but let’s other nations (Canada, Finland) have a tiny bit of sovereignty as a treat.  Those nations can set some of their own policies, but their ultimate fate is to either be swallowed up and annexed by their overlord, or fight a war and escape.  Or I guess wait for their overlord to fight a big war and then ask to leave, that works too.  

Anyway why would anyone join a power bloc, when it all leads to annexation?  Well the key is the EU part of it.  Nations in a power bloc all share a single market.  You should read an economist for a good deep dive as to how common markets are more efficient, but the game does do a damn good job at modeling that too.  You the player don’t have to make sure your own nation produces one of everything, instead other nations can produce some stuff and sell to you in exchange for your stuff.  This lets everyone specialize in their comparative advantage, and unlike the normal trade system this doesn’t cost bureaucracy or convoys, the trade is automatic.  

What this means is that as soon as Britain start building factories to make tools, the rest of its Empire benefits from lower priced tools.  Britain also benefits from having a captive market for its finished goods, sure it’s a lot harder to overproduce tools and cause a surplus that makes your construction cheaper, but you can also let your factories go wild on producing the most high value finished products, because you’ve always got a captive market to sell to.  In turn you can buy up their low value products to keep your population satisfied and keep their standard of living (SOL) rising.

It all makes a certain kind of sense.  I formed a power bloc as America that was a kind of Trade League, which seems to be the only type of Power Bloc that doesn’t end in Annexation.  I invited all of Central and South America into my EU-style trade league, and my population’s SOL shot through the roof.  Overproduction of a good isn’t always useful, because if the cost goes down too much then the people working in the factory don’t get paid (because there is no profit).  This can end with a depression cycle, where their income goes down so their SOL goes down so they buy less meaning the factories sell less meaning their income goes down more, etc.  But all of the Americas was my captive market, any time I build a factory there was someone somewhere to buy the surplus.

And since I had all the best tech, it was always better for the factories to be built in America rather than anywhere else, so it was always my people who got the high paying factory jobs.  The rest of the Americas usually only worked the jobs that were cut off by geography instead of economics.  Large scale coffee and rubber farming for instance.  My capitalists opened rubber farms anywhere they could in South America, and since my factories needed the rubber those rubber farms paid a lot better than any of the less efficient factories opening in those South American countries.

This created a sort of anti-capitalist’s nightmare, capitalism was working by way of a permanent underclass.  The workers in America were getting ever richer because they were producing finished goods to export to South America.  The workers in South America couldn’t compete with the American factories because their nations didn’t have the tech that America did.  They were instead relegated to rubber, coffee, and any other jobs that just couldn’t be done in America or couldn’t be done efficiently.  But they were still benefiting from a rising standard of living (SOL) because the cost of rubber/coffee/etc was rising thanks to American factories and American demand for goods.  This lead to South America also having a rising SOL, just one that was never as high as America, and was capped well below America’s.

The one problem is that that isn’t how it really works in real economics.

The technology of a factory isn’t determine by what country it’s built in, but by the technology available to the investor.  When Apple started building factories in China, they didn’t use Chinese technology (which at the time was well behind America’s).  They brought over all the innovations and insights from Silicon Valley and set up all the tech there.  The factories of China used all the same high tech you’d find anywhere else, just with a lower cost of labor.  

That should be the case in Victoria 3 as well.  It doesn’t make sense that South American factories can never keep up with American ones, if an American capitalist built both then the assembly lines, automatic sewing machines and so on can be brought and shipped to a factory whether it’s in Columbus or Colombia.  You’d expect outsourcing to happen in this scenario, same as happened with China in the 90s and 2000s, but since the technology of a factory is determined by where it’s built and not who builds it, we instead get the anti-capitalist’s nightmare described above.

One final fun fact to end this one: Hawaii was also in my Power Bloc.  I checked the rankings at one point and it was the damnest thing: Hawaii’s standard of living (SOL) was head and shoulders above anywhere else on earth, even my own SOL in America.  

Most nations start the game at SOL of 9 or so.  Industrialized may start at 10, lower tech nations may start at 8.  It’s long and hard to improve your SOL but I’d done a respectable job of bringing America’s SOL up to a baseline of about 20, double what it was at the start and bringing my nation from its starting point of “impoverished,” up through “middling” and into the giddy heights of “secure.”

Hawaii by contrast had an SOL of *35*, way past “secure” and “prosperous,” all the way to “affluent.”  I was shocked, how had this happened?

Well the EU is how, and in a funny way.  See since all the best paying jobs were in America, the people migrated to where the jobs were.  America starts the game with roughly open borders, and if you keep it that way the tired, poor, and huddled masses will be very happy to leave their rubber/coffee jobs and come live in America to work in car factories and get paid 3x as much.

Hawaii starts the game with a miniscule population, and it seemed almost every dang one of them had left and gone to America.  So who was even left to live it large in Hawaii with the SOL of 35?  The capitalists, of course.  

Capitalists can invest in factories remember, and at some point the Hawaiian capitalists had taken advantage of my EU power block to invest in an American factory.  Naturally it was doing gangbusters, and they in turn were swimming in dividends.  So of course they could live the high life, buying lots of stuff since my factories had made everything so cheap.  They could have lots of clothes, porcelain, furniture, even a car or two.  And since all the working classes had gone off to be Americans, the wealthy capitalists were the only ones left on the islands.  This defaulted Hawaii’s SOL to the SOL of the poorest capitalists, an affluent 35 or so.

But wait, if all the working classes left, who sold the capitalists their food?  Who brought over the cars from America, who built their homes and fixed them after the storm?  

No one, like a lot of things Victoria 3 abstracts that all away.  If goods aren’t moved by rail they move by magic, so everything can come off the factory floor in America and teleport magically to the rich capitalist in Hawaii, who never needs to hire a poor handyman to fix his windows or garage either.  

EDITOR’S NOTE: Anyway that’s Vicky 3 in a very long nutshell.  As my friend describes it, you’re here for the economy and *nothing else*.  If economics doesn’t interest you, I hope you don’t mind my blogging.  But if it does, I hope war doesn’t interest you because Vicky 3 doesn’t do it well.  I’d like to say this will be the last time I make a post this scattered and unusual, I wanted to write but didn’t want to so I had someone else write for me essentially.  Hopefully next week we’ll be back to Factorio, I swear I still have much to say about it.

Perception and Reality

Well it’s been one of the most tumultuous 3 and a half weeks in politics, ever since the June debate between Biden and Trump. Since that debate:

  • The media perception of Biden has degraded from “frail but sharp old man” to “doesn’t always know what’s happening around him”
  • The Democratic Party line has gone from “Biden is the nominee, we can’t change him or it will cause chaos” to “Harris is the nominee”
  • Every Democrat in congress seemed to be calling for Biden to step down, and
  • Biden has stepped down as candidate, endorsing Harris

Some Democrats have (as they have all year) said that this was nothing more than an overblown media circus, that would have never caught fire if the lyin’ press hadn’t been so desperate for clicks that they cooked up a scandal. There’s a strong current among the Stancilite wing of the party to claim that every voter is an automaton who believes nothing except what the media says. So if the media says Biden is old, that’s what they believe. But the media *should* have said Biden was sharp as a tack and steering the ship of state, because then everyone would have believed that.

The idea that “The Media” (capital T capital M) is always against the Democrats is part and parcel of liberal mythmaking. Nevermind that it’s also part and parcel of *conservative* mythmaking, I encountered this liberal mythmaking first-hand in the aftermath of the Howard Dean campaign.

The liberal myth goes something like this: Howard Dean was a threat to the Establishment with powerful grassroots organization and nationwide appeal. But one night when trying to give a triumphant yell, he instead gave a weird-sounding scream. The Media repeated the “Dean Scream” endlessly, making a mockery of him to the voters and torching his campaign. In his stead, the underwelming, flip-flopping John Kerry was sent to lose against George W Bush. If *only* we’d stuck with Dean!

The problem with the “Dean Scream” myth is that it reverses cause and effect: it says that The Media used the Dean Scream to discredit him in the eyes of the voters. Yet looking at the record, the Dean Scream happened as he was trying to gin up his supporters after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucus, in which he vastly underperformed expectations and got just 18% of the vote, less than half of front-runner John Kerry and a very distant third behind the ascendant John Edwards.

Taken in context, The Media didn’t discredit Dean, the voters had already turned their backs on him. Dean was supposed to be a front-runner going into the caucus but his very poor showing put paid to that idea hours before his historic scream.

Kerry and Edwards would go on to be presidential and vice presidential nominees for that year.

Yet the idea that the Media creates perception (and therefore reality) still has power among the twitterati. When Biden was dealing with the fallout of the debate, many liberal commentators tore into The Media, claiming that if anyone was suffering from dementia it was rambly, half-awake Donald Trump. And since Biden has now dropped out, liberal commentators are trying to will a “Trump has dementia” angle into existence.

This seems like an insane take to me because *we all saw the debate*. No matter how much Trump lied and deflected, he said real words and you could understand them, Biden sounded like he was barely awake! The line of the night was Trump’s terrifyingly accurate quip of “I don’t know what he just said, and I don’t think he does either.”

And we can all see that Trump has done rally after rally after rally while Biden really *hasn’t*, and team Biden did everything in their power to prevent even a single off-script moment from ever being seen. All the while reports are coming in from allies all across congress and *across the Atlantic* that Biden hasn’t been all there for a really long time, and is confusing people and places left and right.

Meanwhile the curious voter can tune into any one of the many rallies that Trump holds, or just watch Fox News and see a man doing twice as many rallies, interviews and the like than Biden. As well as doing infinitely many more unscipted spots since Biden didn’t seem to do any.

Saying Trump is too old will certainly resonate, half the country already thought he was while 80% of the country thought Biden was. But trying to tar Trump with the same brush Biden got will not work I think because the reality doesn’t look like what the Democrats want out of a narrative. Like the Dean Scream myth, Democrats have taken away the idea that The Media creates reality, and if they can just *will* a narrative into existence, they can say anything about their opponents that their opponents say about them. I don’t think that works any more than Republicans trying to call Democrats election deniers works, because people have eyes.

At the end of the day The Media can certainly amplify stories and let narratives run away with things, but the idea that they can create something out of nothing is a myth. And Democrats trying to say *the media needs to be saying this” ie “Trump has dementia, Trump can’t speak straight,” trying to demand The Media simply reverse the story and put all of Biden’s flaws on Trump, well that isn’t going to work. They’d do a lot better hammering on things which are real instead of trying to create something out of nothing.

That may have been part of the problem for Democrats these past 3 weeks. While they were doing damage control for Biden, the most common rejoinder I saw was “Trump is just as old and just as senile!” The first is false, but at least close to true, Trump is very old. The second is an outright lie, 50 million people saw the debate, and you can’t lie to their face like that.

If Democrats lose, I think The Debate will enter the hall of myths alongside the Dean Scream, as a moment when The Media sharpened their knives and took out the strongest Democratic candidate available because (laughably) they were in the tank for Republican. And I think myths like that will make the party far weaker than it would otherwise be.

Doing the Possible: When is it Impossible?

I recently wrote about “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon,” the book that wants to teach people how to do government well. Some of their message is simple: success in government requires a good plan executed well. But while they want their message to be non-partisan and universalist, I’m not sure it can ever work that way.

The big question I have is this: when is failure because of a good plan done poorly, and when is it because of an impossible plan that would never succeed? For instance, the book lays plenty of criticism at Nixon’s price controls and Ford’s purposeless “WIN” buttons, and it does so by saying that price controls and government nudging cannot control inflation. The book agrees with Milton Friedman than inflation is a monetary phenomenon, solved by Volcker when he hiked interest rates.

On the other hand, the book criticized many plans for their implementation rather than their ideas. Boston’s failed bussing experiment of the 70s is excoriated for how it was done with no real plan or input from the community. But is bussing ever a good policy for implementing desegregation? Many have looked back and said that no, bussing was never going to work. It was unpopular amongst both white and black communities. Just look at this blast from the past:

A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.

Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.

New York Times

Most of those interviewed preferred either changing school boundaries or providing low-income housing in middle-income neighborhoods as preferable plans for school integration. 

In the same vein, the book knocks the Iraqi occupation for having no plan for creating a stable, post-Saddam Iraq. But was that kind of “nation building” even possible for the US military to achieve? Especially in a country with such vast cultural and ideological differences to ours? 

I remember going to school with a guy who served in Iraq. He talked about how he was tasked with keeping Iraqis safe by removing weapons and disarming citizen. He once came to the tent of a Bedouin he thought had a gun and ammo. And when the Bedouin refused to let him search the tent, he simply ordered his troops to cut open all the Bedouin’s bags of rice, ruining his food but finding a hidden AK-47.

The soldier then said that he told this Bedouin “look, you should have just made this easy for us,” but all I could think of was “wow, this is why they fucking hate us.” This soldier just proudly violated the rights that we in America would call the 2nd and 4th amendment, and if he’d done that in America it would be a national scandal. Iraq may not have our constitution, but they still probably feel entitled to basic human rights of dignity and property. Even if we amended our constitution to remove the 2nd and 4th amendments, how would any American feel about armed military personnel breaking into their house, upturning all their belongings, and then stealing their stuff? 

So was “nation-building” even possible? Or was it, like bussing, an idea doomed from the start?

This is the difficulty in analyzing good governance, by focusing on the process you implicitly assume the idea is workable. Now, the authors do mention some ideas that they find impossible. They chide Nixon’s price caps because price caps can’t fix inflation, which is a monetary phenomenon. I happen to agree with them, but that’s because both I and the authors ascribe to an orthodox economic framework. A socialist would disagree with us, saying price caps are perfectly valid but that Nixon just used them poorly.

So a socialist might see Nixon’s price caps as a failure of implementation and not a failure of ideology. And while the authors see bussing and nation-building as failures of implementation and not ideology, a school choice advocate and a non-interventionist would disagree and say that for those ideas, a successful outcome was never possible. So how do you judge policies by their process, when people can’t agree on their possibility?

Ultimately, I think “a bad plan” vs “a good plan, poorly executed” is a political question for which there is no agreed upon answer. And to that, while the tenants of the book may be accepted broadly, it won’t do much to change the tenor of governance even if everyone in America agreed with it. All of politics is about the disagreement over “which plan is good,” and “how do we execute a plan well.” So telling people to “have good plans” and “execute them well” is sort of like telling a sprinter to “just run faster.” It’s advice that does nothing.

I think the book is good, I think it’s well worth a read by anyone interested in politics. I just think it’s impact will not be too great even in the minds of its readers.

Doing the Possible: Musings on good governance

I’ve been reading “If We Can Put a Man on the Moon,” which is a book that attempts to explain why some government policy succeeds and some fails. The book outlines how public policy requires a clear objective, a clear plan to reach that objective, and the ability to follow through with it. It all seems rather obvious when you write it out like that, but the book offers some definite insights.

A clear objective seems obvious, but is surprisingly easy to overlook. Gerald Ford promised to “whip inflation now,” but how exactly did he expect to do that? Supposedly the government would politely encourage citizens to do things like grow more food and use less fuel, to increase supply and decrease demand. It’s a nice idea, but polite encouragement doesn’t move the economy, and Fords “WIN” policy went nowhere.

A clear plan is also something that seems obvious, but often gets overlooked. When California reformed its electric grid in the 90s, no one had really thought through how the new system would work. They set mandates to ensure that prices were capped for consumers, but did nothing to ensure adequate supply. It was legal, for example, to buy power at a low price in California and export it for the uncapped price in other states. Then, if California didn’t have enough power, the utility was obligated to import power from other states no matter the cost, but was not allowed to pass this cost on to customers. This lead to companies easily gaming the system by exporting power for cheap, then re-importing it at a higher price. 

People like to blame greedy companies for the failed California power experiment, but companies are always greedy in all cases. The government should create a system in which corporate greed leads to societal good, such as how tech companies have given us ever better computers at lower and lower cost. Failure to plan leads to a system that is designed to fail.

The ability to follow through is a common complaint, but it too has unexpected pitfalls. The political class has different incentives than both the bureaucrats and the people, but they all work together for a plan to succeed. Politicians have an incentive to pass a bill and say they “fixed” something, that’s why most celebration happens on when a bill is pass instead of 5 years later when its effects are being evaluated. Bureaucrats are just career workers like anyone, and have an incentive to do their job and get paid. They aren’t incentivized to go above and beyond for the benefit of a politician who might not be there in four years. 

This is why it’s so common for politicians to take office promising “big changes” but still not accomplish much. Once the bill is passed and the photo-op is finished, it’s out of their hands and they don’t has a reason to keep caring. And when someone comes in saying they’ll “upend the stuffy bureaucracy,” well if they don’t meet the career employees halfway they’ll engender resentment in a group that can drag its feet and wait for the political will to die down.

All told, the book does have a lot of prescriptions for good governance:

  • Have an idea for how to fix a problem, and don’t make a plan of action without a strong idea. Likewise, seek out good ideas from everywhere, and be willing to challenge your own ideas to see if they’re actually appropriate.
  • Make a rational design for how the problem will be fixed. Focus on the design, not just on getting buy-in from the right pressure groups. Stress-test the design and hire people to poke holes in it. Then fix those design holes before passing a new law.
  • Ensure oversight and continued evaluation even after a law is passed. The job doesn’t end after the vote and the signature.
  • Understand that government is different than any other sector, and that you have to meet people halfway. You can’t treat public employees or the public at large as workers in your company or as cogs in a machine. 
  • Don’t assume the success of a plan. And don’t assume that just because it hasn’t failed yet that it won’t in the future. Look for any signs that cracks are forming, and fix them before they get too big. The space shuttle Colombia flew 27 missions, many of which showed problem signs, before the fateful 28th mission that ended in disaster.
  • Keep re-evaluating. If a program is no longer fit for purpose, fix it, replace it, or kill it. Be willing to see that something isn’t working and be willing to change it. And don’t keep trying the same program over and over without change, be willing to go back to the beginning and look for new ideas and new designs.

That, in a nutshell is what the book is about (or at least my reading of it). It’s certainly more uplifting that what you expect from a book about governance, but without ignoring the data and the details. I’ll have more to say on it later, but I think anyone who likes this sort of thing should check it out.

Beware of maps that are just population density maps

Sorry for forgetting to post last week. I haven’t kept up with this blog as much as I should be.

XKCD has a well-known comic showing how we too often overanalyze what are really just population density maps. It’s very easy to notice a pattern and extrapolate silly things from it. I recently saw another such example of this on social media I wanted to quickly bring up.

The implications of this map seems obvious, there were way more battles in Europe than anywhere else on earth. People on social media had all sorts of explanations:

Population density: battles mostly happen where people are, see the big stretch of emptiness in the Canadian Arctic, for instance. Europe has been densely populated for most of its history, so of course it had a lot of battles.

Recency bias: Europe fought 2 World Wars within the last century or so. As the largest wars in human history these of course had the most battles in human history, so there’s a lot of data points from that.

Warlike nature: maybe Europeans are just more warlike than the peaceful people in other parts of the world?

But the most obvious explanation seemed to be missing: Wikipedia is edited by the global online community, which is dominated by the the Anglosphere and Europe. Anglospheric and European editors will naturally gravitate towards writing many many articles about Europe and it’s history rather than the history of the world outside of Europe. A battle of 3000 people in the middle ages will have been studied by students in whatever country it happened in, even if it wasn’t important globally. And if that student was European or from the Anglosphere it’s more likely that they’ll grow up to be a Wikipedia editor and so add this unimportant battle into the encyclopedia.

So while there are some trends on this map that do come from the underlying data (ie there are way less battles in places where few people live), most of it is a function of bias. People write what they know. If there was an Indian version of Wikipedia instead, I’m certain the density of dots would be a lot higher there and a lot lower in Europe.

“The Crime of ’73”

Boy, these posts aren’t quite coming out weekly now are they?

I might have posted on this topic before, but I wanted to write something down and this was on my mind. It’s interesting how the controversies of yesteryear always fade away, even though in their day they dominated the news and the mind-space of politically conscious voters.

Take the Silver vs Gold movement. When America was founded, it had a bi-metallic standard, meaning that both silver and gold were legal tender. Congress set down in writing how much weight of silver made a dollar and how much gold made a dollar, and so both could be used to buy and sell. But of course, as commodities the price of silver and gold in the market would fluctuate, but congress didn’t understand or act quickly enough to fix things.

For example, silver mines in Mexico continued to run and depressed the price of silver relative to gold. This created an arbitrage opportunity because the price of gold was higher than that of silver:

  • Take 10 silver dollars and exchange them for 10 gold dollars, as they are equivalent
  • Take the gold dollars to Mexico and melt them down.
  • Take that gold and exchange it for raw silver
  • Bring that silver back to the Mint in America and demand to have it struck into silver dollars. Because of the price difference between silver and gold, the silver you brought back will make more than 10 dollars worth, so you can pocket the extra as your profit.
  • Start back from the beginning, trading 10 silver dollars for 10 gold dollars

This happened because congress set a fixed value for a commodity who’s value changed on the market, and as that value changed there was arbitrage created. Gold flowed out of the country and was replaced with silver. When the California gold rush happened, the price of gold suddenly decreased and the whole process reversed. Congress didn’t understand what was happening, and so simply decided to remove the bimetallic standard to stop this from happening.

But now we get to “The Crime of 1873.” When congress removed the silver standard in 1873, silver miners could no longer have their pure silver struck into coins that could be used as tender. The mint was by far the largest purchaser of silver and so removing silver from the standard removed most of the demand and so killed the price. Congress therefore upended the livelihoods of thousands of miners and mining towns by changing the laws on coinage. And those people never forgave them.

For years this “Crime” was the hottest topic in certain political sections. It was the litmus test for candidates and parties. And it was the entire foundation of the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan. For years, certain voters would never vote for a candidate or party who had supported the “Crime,” and they may not have even kept polite company with voters who supported those candidates. In its time, the “Crime” was seen as the greatest betrayal possible, and plenty of people pointed to it as the reason for national or local economic problems. They blamed the “Crime” and hoped that overturning it would fix things.

Of course, America never regained the silver standard. For a time, the Federal government compromised and declared it would still buy silver from the miners directly, but in time even this subsidy was removed. The people affected by the “Crime” probably never forgave the Republicans (who passed the bill) for what they did. Indeed the “Crime’s” authors had a hard time defending their actions in the face of angry voters. Some authors claimed that the bill didn’t do what critics claimed, and that the US had technically been non-silver since 1853. Others claimed that ending the silver standard was an unintended biproduct. But this had the perverse effect of amplifying conspiracy theorists who believed the bill was passed with malicious intend, and giving ammo to those who wanted to overturn it.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the “Crime of 73” was as much a controversial topic as any political topic today. Friendships could be ended by it. But it too did pass. I think most of the controversies of our day shall also pass, these days even American History students will barely remember the “Crime.”

Good idea: financially supporting workers displaced by AI. Bad idea: taxing companies when for displacing workers with AI.

AI is again the topic of the day and people are discussing what to do about the coming “job-pocolypse.” It seems AI can do anything we humans can do better and so 30% or more of jobs will be destroyed and replaced by AI. Leaving aside how accurate that prediction is, if 30% of all jobs will be impacted then it does warrant a public policy response. Everyone’s got their own personal favorite, but one I see come up again and again is that companies should face a hefty tax any time they replace a worker with AI.

To be blunt, taxing companies for replacing workers with AI is a terrible idea. Let’s leave aside the argument of “how do you prove it,” and cut straight to the fact that the government should not be taxing technological progress. Just to start with some history, how many farmers were displaced by tractors? Millions. In 1900 40% of Westerners worked on farms, now it’s less than 5%. Tractors meant that a single farmer could do the labor of tens or hundreds of men, and so they could fire many of their farm hands to be replaced by tractors. But does anyone reading this wish nearly 1/2 of us were still farmers? Should the government have heavily taxes tractors to preserve the idyllic rural farm life?

The argument in favor of taxing companies that replace workers with a machine is that the company is becoming more profitable at the expense of the worker, and they should pay it back. The current hullabaloo is about being replaced by AI, but in the 20th century similar calls were made when factory workers were being replaced by robots. The problem with this argument is that ignores society. The worker and the company are not the only 2 pieces of the equation, society in general benefits when companies become more efficient. Technology is deflationary, and it has allows many products to drop or price or not increase as rapidly as wages in general. Food today costs less as a percent of annual income than at nearly any time in history, and a large part of that is because the cost of food is decoupled from the cost of labor. So farm hands being replaced by tractors helped all of society by giving us cheaper food, and all of society would have been harmed if taxes had been instituted to prevent tractors from becoming commonplace.

Are the workers harmed when their jobs are replaced by AI? Yes of course. But society itself is helped and so all of society should bear the costs of helping the workers. We should of course offer unemployment benefits and job retraining to those affected. We should not let them go by the wayside the way we did to blue collar factory workers in the 20th century.

But neither should we shoot society in the foot by blocking technological progress that will help all of us. AI replacing jobs will mean products will become cheaper relative to wages, just as what happened with food. A lot of people also spread nonsense that unemployment will skyrocket as the displaced workers can’t find other jobs. They misunderstand economics, there will always be demand for more jobs. The price of some goods will decrease thanks to AI, but that means that people can buy more of those goods or buy more of others goods that they put off buying because they were forced to choose and only had so much money. As prices fall, demand will rise, raising demand for labors in other areas, and a new equilibrium will be reached. Those jobs lost due to AI don’t mean the workers will be forever jobless, any more than 35% of the population displaced by tractors meant that unemployment skyrocketed in the 20th century. Time and time and time again technology has replaced the jobs of workers, and the workers have found new jobs. It will happen again with AI.

Socialism Betrayed: Racist Great Man theory of history strikes again

There was some mid historian who once said: “The history of modern Europe can be defined by 3 men: Napoleon, Lenin, and Hitler.” This plithy remark sums up much about the “great man” theory of history.

For those who don’t know, the great man theory believes that history is moved not by economic or societal or any large scale forces, but by the actions of individuals, the “great men” (almost never women). This theory opines that it was Napoleon, whose conquests spread republicanism throughout Europe and whose terrorizing of European monarchs lead to the Concert of Europe, it was this Napoleon who defined the course of the 19th century. And in just the same way, Lenin and Hitler in their own ways defined the course of the 20th century, pulling Europe in their directions of communism or fascism, remaking the modern world through their life and death. NATO and the Warsaw pact, whose presence defined Europe for half a century, came about because of Hitler. And Leninist communism, which defined the ideological struggle between East and West, came about obviously due to Lenin.

This great man theory has been attacked by much better historians than I, but I want to focus right now on how it completely invalidates the role of any individual in society except the Great Man himself. Napoleon without an army to command and a state to lead is nothing, and yet his soldiers, his bureaucrats, and the entire nation he inherited are meaningless in the great man theory of history. And the revolutions which toppled the monarchy and allowed Napoleon to begin his rise were not the actions of solitary great men, but a great mass movement of the French people as a whole. It is likely that even if Napoleon had never existed, the conflict between revolutionary republicanism and monarchism which defined much of his legacy would still have happened. And if Lenin had not existed, the conflict between capitalism and communism would likely still have been present.

I’m reading “Socialism Betrayed” by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny and it’s startling how in the very first pages of the book, they define their thesis that the great man theory is true and the people of society do not matter.

The collapse of the Soviet Union did not occur because of an internal economic crisis or popular uprising. It occurred because of the reforms initiated at the top by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev

Socialism Betrayed

Really?! It didn’t happen because of nationalist movements among the subjugated peoples of the USSR, like the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians? It didn’t happen because of mass movements which defined the collapse of every other Warsaw Pact nation in Europe? It didn’t happen because of the well-documented shortages and flailing USSR economy propped up almost entirely by oil and gas money? How easy it is to do history when you can define your villain and ignore all context!

I can already tell that this book will be dumb. Real dumb. Probably as bad as “The End of Growth” for how much it will ignore the facts to suit and opinion. Why are all the dumbest books I read the anti-capitalist ones?

“Market Capitulation” is a circular argument

Will the market recover in the new year? Or do we still have a ways to go? Bears online have been going on and on about “capitulation” as in “nothing will change until we finally have capitulation.” Capitulation in normal terms means surrender, so in financial terms it means the point where investors finally give up holding and sell their shares at a loss. According to Investopedia capitulation is also the point where the investment hits its bottom. Prima facia this is a circular argument, “we won’t hit the bottom until we’ve reached the bottom” is another way to phrase it. But even dumber, this is a backwards looking argument that cannot be used for predictions. Over the year of 2022, $SPY (a popular ETF that tracks the performance of the S&P 500) hit it’s 52 week low in November at 348$ per share (it currently trades at 382$). Who’s to say that that wasn’t the capitulation, and it won’t go below that? When the S&P500 hit 666 in 2009, that was the bottom of the bear market, yet many people still didn’t believe it, expecting that there was still more pain to endure. It wasn’t until a while later that we realized no, that really was the bottom, there’s no more “capitulation” after that. So I don’t put any stock in people talking about “market capitulation.”

Interpretatio graeca for Chinese myths and legends

I’ve been reading an interesting book from 1931. It discusses the motifs and references used in Chinese art, highlighting the Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist stories that many of them derive from. However the book has a problem in that the authors were clearly trying to relate every Chinese story back to the stories they were more familiar with, mainly Indian Buddhist stories but also Roman/Greek ones as well. The Romans used to do this all the time, they called it “interpretatio graeca.” The Romans figured that every god or goddess in every culture was merely a manifestation of a god they were already familiar with, so they would “interpret” foreign gods as being the same or similar to their Roman/Greek gods. So Ra, the chief god of the Egyptians, got conflated with Apollo in Roman writings because since they shared a sun motif they must be identical, right? But Ra was not the same as Apollo, and Chinese myths are not the same as Indian myths, yet the authors of this book keep conflating the two and interpreting Chinese myths through a lens of Indian myths.

The book itself is called Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives (sic) by C.A.S. Williams. In many respects it works well as an overview of the history and stories that make up a lot of Chinese art, and a primer into Chinese art culture. And yet it falls into this trap again and again of trying to interpret everything unfamiliar through the lens of the familiar. I understand perhaps that for the reader this can make things easier, saying that “This god is the king of the gods, he rules the sky and causes lightning to happen” may be harder to remember than saying “he’s like Zeus,” but saying “he’s like Zeus” brings a bunch of inaccurate assumptions that really aren’t true to what the Chinese sky god is actually like.

I wonder if this is in part because of out-dated theories in comparative religion. There was a vibe for a time of assuming that all myths and legends were just borrowed or stolen from earlier cultures. Jupiter and Zeus weren’t an original idea, they must have been borrowed by the Greeks and Romans from some previous culture that had a sky god wielding thunderbolts and ruling the other gods. The theory went on to say that every single sky-god in history was just a borrowing of a borrowing from an “original” sky god that was dreamed up 10,000 years ago. But the other option is to realize that “sky god causes thunder” is an easy thing for different people to come up with independently. Assuming that every myth in history was borrowed from somewhere else is also how you got inaccurate claims that for example “Jesus was just re-branded Mithra” and other ahistorical nonsense. It’s a very human feeling to want to related everything back to something you already know well, but it doesn’t lead to good history and so it should not be a feeling used in Academic writing.

Still, for a book from 1931 Outlines is surprisingly good, I enjoy being able to read the characters and phrases it writes in original Chinese, and learning the meaning behind some of them with it’s usually accurate descriptions of etymology. The descriptions of myth and stories generally seem accurate and the nonstop conflations with Indian myths can be ignored. I got this for 6$ at a used book store and I think it was worth the money.